What era of design was your favorite?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnConstantine

Jobs

Sage - Has never been good

Pictomancer - Overrated

Viper - lol

ERP Scene
Dawntrail

Ease of cheating
Dawntrail

RMT
Dawntrail

Ease of stalking
Dawntrail

Obsession with FFLogs
Dawntrail

Ease of playing other games
Endwalker/Dawntrail

---

Savage XD

I agree though

I liked arr/hw era the most despite the jankiness of job/battle/mechanics design. And also like stormblood era for having nice balance while still keeping most of each jobs identity.

Heavensward for sure.
It's funny I was one of the few rare weirdos that actually liked Dark arts spam and Bard mage xD

But the game was just overall better, had it's flaws as it was still young, but wasn't overly simple and homogenized like it is now.

Unfortunately a player like me can only listen to stories about what the game was like, such is the curse of the live service game. I really really want to play old SCH to see how controlling the old fairy was like..... :(

The fact that old duties are still playable in the current game is a really strong aspect of FFXIV, so I think a "legacy echo" would be really popular, a setting to be able to use old level cap eras (50-ARR, 60-HW, 70-SB) of jobs in the overworld and in duties of the expansions.
Of course there were many game systems that were key components of past expansions outside of the job design, but I think even just being able to play default versions of old jobs would be really fun.

PVP jobs in Endwalker/Dawntrail for job design
Dawntrail for fight design

It's hard really to say because different things were better at different times.

• QoL - Dawntrail (some really annoying things took 10 years to fix in many cases)
• Holy Trinity - ARR/Heavensward/Stormblood
• Job Uniqueness - ARR/Heavensward
• Job Accessibility - Shadowbringers/Endwalker/Dawntrail
• Cleaned up jank - Shadowbringers

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnConstantine

Jobs

---

• ARR: WHM (Cleric Stance, most pre-oGCD era of healing)
• HW: WAR (stuns not homogenized, Raw Intuition crit from the back was kinda a cool idea, WARs valued BRD's Warden's), SCH (Cleric Stance, got some basic abilities post-ARR), DRK (janky but I was never doing the same thing at any point, SB was kinda a medium to what we have now)
• SB: MNK, SAM, BRD (this is hard because ARR and HW were good but SB was the most fun time with BRDs everywhere)
• ShB: MCH, DRG, AST (3.0 was alright too, but 5.0 acknowledged the damage focus), RDM (not excited about all the added procs in DT tbh)
• EW: DNC, SMN, GNB (because Double Down), PLD (I'd say Stormblood when its MP mattered, but 6.0-6.2 was pretty fun), NIN (never played it much but tbh was fine in EW)
• DT: SGE (just because more attacks :p), BLM (better for casual BLMs until 7.3, but honestly the 7.3 timer removal is not as bad as people thought it would be because planning is still a big aspect)

I made a similar thread specifically for jobs a while back on the topic

As for content design ShB since I don't know anything earlier.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Milea

Actually I think the bicolor system is why people don't care about fates.

---

I don't agree. FATE farming was a massive thing for leveling alts until POTD released and that changed everything. The recommended way to level alts switched from FATEs to POTD and people never learned different anymore, so FATEs got abandoned. FATE farming was still big a thing in Heavensward after that for anima relic farming, but that's it because then it got nerfed hard.

Bicolor gemstones restored FATE farming. Even if you don't see PFs up for it, people are doing it solo in many cases. The problem is actually that most people don't setup PFs anymore. They need to be taught to - so if anyone here is running FCs, don't forget to teach all those new players to setup PFs for everything. They come into discord servers and ask how they can get people to help them FATE farm, completely oblivious to the concept of PF that we always used for this purpose.

They've added long-term mount grinds for it since EW as well so there's even more reason why people would be farming them.

Stormblood, but with a handful of QoL passes that ShB+ brought. Things like timer removals, tank stance not being a damage down (seriously, threat management was never fun when mismanaging it meant a good DPS getting obliterated by TBs.) But the fight design of the stormblood->T1 ShB era, up to and including DRS, is when FFXIV peaked, and fight design has slowly gotten worse since then.

As an extra point, there is no point in the game's history that healers and tanks have had good gameplay. The devs tried to do something interesting in ARR, but they made WHM and PLD way, way too overpowered. The only way to fix this oversight is to nerf healers and tanks (in terms of healing, mitigation, and shields) into the dirt. Remove oGCD healing except for very rare spells, make rampart the strongest mit any tank has and remove every other form of obscene mitigation. It's the only way to actually diversify tanking and healing gameplay, but requires a complete rethink of how these classes are intended to interact with fights. That is, break the buster meta over its back and make spot healing with GCDs and sustained tanking with proper cooldown rotations to allow for drain tanking/shield tanking/etc to become prevalent.

You can't have good healer or tank design in a realm where 20% mit and 40% mit is your baseline for a tankbuster, and the ability to heal 40% of the entire party's HP in a single, free, oGCD. That just does not work, at all.

What I like least about the latest expansions is the fact that the open world is criminally underused. In that sense, the design up to Stormblood felt more immersive and fitting for an MMO.
Maybe it's just nostalgia, but in that sense, I miss ARR more than any other expansion that came after.